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So that’s how the promise of electoral reform ends: Editorial

So that’s how the promise of electoral reform in our time ends. Not with a bang, but with an extended whimper in the House of Commons about how tough it is to get people to agree on what to do.

The all-party committee of MPs tasked with studying the thorny question of how to reform our election system produced a report on Thursday that was ostensibly a big step toward that goal. Instead, it is surely the effective end of the whole issue for the foreseeable future.

Members of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform address the media in Ottawa Thursday. (CHRIS WATTIE / REUTERS)

To be sure, there will be more talk — lots of it. Millions of postcards will be landing in mail boxes across the country soon, asking Canadians to make their views known on how we should elect our national representatives.

But the report the MPs came up with, and the government’s initial response to it, leaves open the question of why anyone should spend part of their precious pre-holiday time pondering a question that the government itself is backing away from at high speed.

To recap: the Trudeau Liberals issued a “democratic reform” platform back in June of last year when they were stuck in third place in the polls and bidding for left-leaning voters. Among many proposals, they included a pledge to make the 2015 general election the last one to be conducted under our current “first past the post” (FPTP) system.

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The fatal flaw in that promise was that they did not include a suggested alternative to FPTP. So even after winning the election the Liberals can’t claim a mandate for introducing any particular new system. And that leaves them in a grey zone, insisting there must be “broad support” from the public before reform can go ahead, but not precisely defining what that means.

Importantly, then, one of the key things the MPs agreed on in their report, the fruit of six months of study and cross-country consultation, is that Canadians should get a direct voice on changing the system through a national referendum.

That’s a wise recommendation: it’s always been obvious that a government elected with 39 per cent of the vote on an unclear mandate for reform should not use its parliamentary majority to force through changes to something as fundamental as the voting system. A referendum may be cumbersome, expensive and may well not produce the outcome reformers want, but in the absence of clear cross-party support for change it’s the only way to go.

The other big recommendation from the committee is to put FPTP on a referendum ballot along with some kind of proportional representation system, the clear favourite of those who are sufficiently interested in the issue to turn up at town hall meetings organized by the MPs’ committee over the past few months.

But the committee left open exactly what kind of PR system should be chosen, instead discussing various options and opening the door to a lot more lengthy discussion about the ins and outs of possible systems. It even threw in the “Gallagher Index,” a mind-bending mathematical equation used to calculate exactly how representative a particular system would be.

These are not trivial issues. Under some possible systems, a lot more seats would have to be added to the House of Commons to ensure representation more proportional to the vote; under other systems, several ridings might be merged into one that would be represented by MPs from different parties. And so on.

The Liberals on the committee produced their own minority report, concluding that Canadians aren’t ready for such “radical” changes and that reform should not be “rushed” in time for the next election scheduled for October 2019. And the minister in charge of the issue, Maryam Monsef, sounded positively dismissive, saying the committee “took a pass” on the hard questions they were asked to look at.

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Officially, the government says it’s still committed to fulfilling its promise of reform by the next election. The prime minister stuck by that as recently as Wednesday.

If that’s truly their goal, they’re going about it in an extremely odd way. A more logical conclusion is that they are letting this particular promise collapse under its own weight. It would be more honest simply to acknowledge that the promise cannot be met than to let this farce drag on, wasting the time of MPs and voters alike.

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